Introduction

One year and two months ago, in November 2016, the newspaper The Brunei Times (BT), closed and took down its online news website along with its exit. This website was chock-full of BT news articles dating back to 2007. It didn’t have the slickest of website designs, but it was functional, had a good search facility, and was mostly reliable. It was also well-indexed and likely to come up at the top of online search results, making it easy to find information; whether you were a student or researcher, running a business or getting work done, or just looking for information.

Snapshot of The Brunei Times website on 6 Nov 2016, as archived by archive.is website. Full snapshot can be seen here: http://archive.is/avZT6

Newspaper resources are available at libraries for reference, but for many of us, BT’s online archives are sorely missed. We used to be only a Google search box away from finding the article we wanted. It is not always easy to find current, authoritative information about Brunei online.

So for anyone still struggling with the loss of BT’s website, this is a brief guide that will help you search for copies of BT’s online articles. (Spoiler: There is a flowchart! And a little bit of work ahead.) Good luck!

What To Expect

You will primarily learn to use the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) and be aware of other sources to look into.

These sources help you to search for the article, but does not guarantee you will find it. It’s possible that the article you are looking for has not been archived online.

If the article seems incomplete, it’s because I had wanted to write a detailed guide, but changed my mind. There were even cute icons! In the end, I found it more valuable for my time (and sanity) to just post what I have completed so far.

If you are interested in possibly adapting, extending or otherwise re-appropriating the guide in other forms, I would be open, and even happy, to see that! I can envision this guide as, say, a web app, or a video or some form of interactive visual guide, or even a comic. *hint hint* Please see the Creative Commons license at the end of this article if you are interested!

What You Need To Know

Is there no full copy of the BT website online? / Can’t I just go to the library?

As far as I know, there is no complete archive or mirror of the BT website that is publicly available online. The online sources used in this guide certainly cannot replace newspaper archives kept by libraries.

How can any online copies exist if the website is gone?

There are some websites, such as the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) and archive.is (archive.is), that archive, or save an online copy, of other websites. There are also websites that make copies of files from the BT website, such as e-paper PDFs. These archival websites made copies when the BT website was still up and running. Most of these websites are run in the interest of public access to information and not for profit.

See the section “Four sources” for a little description of each of these sources.

What pieces of information do I need?

Many of you will probably look for articles based on one or more of these:

Looking for a specific article? Start with the pieces of information do you have. From there, figure out what source you need.

Want a more general search? Browse a source instead, for example by month and year.

The flowchart gives you specific steps to follow, which may be helpful to some people but feel constraining to others. I have found it useful if I really want to find something, because it means searching more than one source.

How do I find old BT URLs?

I originally had a section on using the Google search engine, specifically Google Cache, to find old URLs. Unfortunately, it eventually became unreliable – Google inevitably began clearing its caches about half a year after the BT website shut down.

You may encounter them in the wild – an old blog post, a Wikipedia article, an article reference, and so on. You can also find them from archived pages, for example, here’s the front page of the BT website on the day of 21st March 2015, containing many links to BT URLs.

You only have instructions for Wayback Machine. Where are the instructions for archive.is, BT Archive and E-Paper Archive?

This article is only a brief guide. Instructions for other sources will be posted in the future as an appendix.

I do believe that knowing how to use Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) is your most valuable starting point, as it contains the largest number of archived BT website pages.

What about Borneo Bulletin or other Brunei news websites?

If you get the hang of searching with the Wayback Machine and archive.is, you should also be able to use them to search for missing articles from other news websites too. This is relevant to, for example, the Borneo Bulletin’s website (borneobulletin.com.bn) and Pelita Brunei’s website (pelitabrunei.gov.bn), for which I noticed many of their articles before 2017 are inaccessible.

Four Info Types, Four Sources

Four pieces of information

So you’re looking for a specific article. What information do you already have?

Type of information

Example

Sources you can use

Original URL on The Brunei Times website

http://www.bt.com.bn/home_news/2009/
03/19/students_eager_over_ubdfm

Wayback Machine

archive.is

BT Archive (via headline/date)

BT E-Paper Archive (via date)

Headline

Students eager over UBDfm

BT Archive

Date

19 Mar 2009

Wayback Machine

BT Archive

BT E-Paper Archive

Keywords

UBD, radio network, UBDfm

Use a search engine to get a URL, Headline or Date

If you’re not looking for a specific news article, but are looking for sets of articles from a section (Business, Sports, Features) or column (On The Road, Refresh) or a specific author, this is possible from some of the sources I use in this article. However, I will not be covering them specifically.

So, you should now know which sources to use, based on what type of information you already have.

Four sources

You will mainly be using one or a combination of four sources. In this article, I will only explain how to use the Wayback Machine.

Again, reiterating my major disclaimer at the top of this article: It is not guaranteed you will actually find the article you want. None of these sources have a complete copy of The Brunei Times.

About each source

Wayback Machinearchive.isUnofficial BT ArchivesOther Sources

Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is an immense source of internet history. Do you remember that website you frequently visited in 2008? That flash game website, or that blog, or that forum? It might be archived here.

Working “snapshots” of websites are saved in the Wayback Machine and organised by date. Archiving used to happen only when your website happened to be picked up by an automated web crawler. Luckily, these days, it is possible to submit a URL and have it immediately archived instead of waiting for a web crawler.

1) The BT Archive (Link): A website that displays BT articles in a similar format to the website’s structure, using the same section names and categories. There is a little extra too, such as listing of articles by author name, and estimated reading times per article.

2) An Unofficial Brunei Times Archive (Link): An archive listing the e-papers (digital daily issues) of The Brunei Times. The e-papers are stored in image (JPEG) format on Flickr. The e-papers can be browsed by date, and there is a nifty cover view as well.

Sometimes, other websites – news sites or archives or otherwise – will also have archived or mirrored BT news articles. A source like the Asia News Network website, for example, contains under 200 articles sourced from BT, mostly from 2016.

The main four sources I’ve chosen are Wayback Machine, archive.is and the unofficial archives, as they are consistent and possess a significant bulk of archives.

If found: Calendar view shows how many times, per day, month and year, that a snapshot of that URL has been captured. Click one of the dates to see the snapshot on that date.

If not found: Wayback will say it doesn’t have it!

Alternate URLs

There are a number of alternate subdomains that were used by The Brunei Times throughout the years. Generally, we can switch up subdomains in the URLs, for example:

http:// [subdomain] /news-national/2012/07/01/gearing-hms-birthday

So if one subdomain (e.g. www.bt.com.bn ) gives no results in Wayback, you can continue your search by replacing [subdomain] with another subdomain (e.g. archive.bt.com.bn ).

The following subdomains* are applicable:

www: In the Wayback Machine, searching for a URL beginning with www.bt.com.bn and bt.com.bn will give the same results. So you only need to try one of them! Example, just search one of these URLs instead of both:

m.bt.com.bn: The mobile version of the BT website, there are 1,679 snapshots available on Wayback Machine. Only articles from 2013 onwards are applicable. Worth a try if you don’t find your article with the www subdomains.

Only try these subdomains* if you’re desperate – there aren’t many snapshots using them!

mail.bruneitimes.com.bn: There are 883 snapshots, although only half appear to be article snapshots.

archive.bt.com.bn: This appeared to be BT’s own archive website for their articles. The Wayback Machine only has 172 snapshots from this subdomain. Only articles in 2013 are applicable.

(* Some of you may notice that these are not all subdomains, so this is for simplicity’s sake!)

Browse by date

If you have the article’s exact date or an idea of the month or year of the article, you can try these steps.

If yes: A list of search results will show, as above. You can even further filter results in the filter box (e.g. type in keyword “council”, or date “01/01”). If you find the article you’re looking for, click the URL to view the archived snapshot of the article. Yay!

If not: No results will be shown. Aww.

(4) (Optional) Try with other subdomains

If you’ve understood the concept of subdomains in “Directly search with URL“, you can try them here as well. So, to browse national news in 2013 under archive.bt.com.bn and m.bt.com.bn , you would visit both:

Other sources

For archive.is, The BT Archive, and An Unofficial Brunei Times Archive, I will not expand on specific instructions in this article. They will be posted in the future as an appendix. (If there isn’t a link here yet, they haven’t been posted yet!)

I may accelerate the process if anyone actually contacts me to let me know you actually want these instructions 🙂 Send a message through our contact form!

If you plan to search the alternate subdomains (see “Directly search with URL“) with archive.is, don’t bother! I’ve found that it only has a mere 18 snapshots of local news and articles from the alternate subdomains archive.bt.com.bn , m.bt.com.bn and mail.bruneitimes.com.bn . I’ve compiled all 18 snapshots here:

If the page has already been archived in the Wayback Machine, but you wish to save a new version (because the page changed since being last archived), you can archive it again by typing in the URL http://web.archive.org/save/http://www.url.com in your browser (where www.url.com should be replaced with the URL of the document you wish to save).

Hope that helped! 🙂 If yes, do consider sharing this article, or dropping us your comments below or via our contact form.

In closing, I believe that news and public information should be easily accessible, especially when it contributes to our national archives, as a record for our society. I apologise that this article could not be posted sooner, and hope that it can be of use to those who still need it. Thank you for reading.

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Credits

- Icons from "Circle Icons" set generously provided under GPL by Nick Roach on Iconfinder (as of article date). View iconset at https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/circle-icons-1
- Text written with StackEdit. Visit at https://stackedit.io/
- Flowchart created with Draw.io. Visit at http://draw.io/

----- Acknowledgements -----
I am a fervent user of both Wayback Machine and archive.is - if you believe they do good, even important, work, do consider supporting them! Also I'm thankful for the volunteers who gathered and preserved the articles from The Brunei Times for the unofficial archives; do drop them your thanks as well.